With relation to the gender of avatars showing in the emotes, this has absolutely no relationship to the gender of the person sitting behind the keyboard. Just as all of our players who choose to play orcs should not be concerned that people think they are green in real life based on their emoticons. This is just another representation of the avatar you chose when you signed up for the game. It is not meant to be a representation of you as a human being.

There's no doubt in my mind you didn't want to force people to shout out their gender in chat but that doesn't mean that's not what you're doing. While it's entirely possible or a male to play a female character or a female to play a male character and thus people should always take the profile gender with a grain of salt, more times than not, they don't. They see the male or female picture on your profile or now, your emoticon and they assume you're either or. Something that takes less than a second during the creation of your account instantly defines what gender you will be perceived as.

GM Luna wrote:

This concern makes the huge assumption that someone should feel uncomfortable or unsafe in our game based off of the gender of the avatar they've chosen. I hope you'll understand why I (female gamer, woman in the video games industry and primary moderator of our community) might find that a little bit frustrating.

In other words, rather than being concerned about a potential imagined increase in sexual harassment based on showing gender in emoticons, report all cases of actual sexual harassment and there will be no problem with the emoticons showing gender. Creating a safe environment in our game for all players is a top priority, and pretending that gender (both in real life and in our game avatars) doesn't exist isn't really a very good solution from where I sit.

Luna

Given there are still members who for more than a year have had bouts of racist and/or sexist outbursts on the forums or in chat, that eventually drove some people away from the from either the forums or GC altogether, I have to say that I don't really take that comment too seriously. There have be far too many people who I would have marked as BoS (ban on sight) ages ago that are still free to play the game. As such it's no wonder that female gamers don't feel comfortable telling people that they are female.

I don't really care about the emoticons themselves, I don't use them but I think it's absolutely ridiculous that those who do use them are forced to display their profile gender to everyone in chat. I actually wouldn't mind an option to change the gender of your account or choose to remain "unidentified" if I so choose but that gets into the topic of gender identity which is probably better for another topic.

It doesn't matter what gender anyone thinks you are in RL, that is my point. You should be treated with respect regardless, therefore showing a female or male emote is irrelevant. There is no new issue created by the emoticons that didn't exist already. And the global chat and forum rules cover these things very well already.

Also, I'm not omnipotent. If someone is harassing you (or whoever) I have to be told these things or I will not know. I can't be held responsible for acting on hypothetical things that I have never seen or have never been reported to me.

The assertion that the solution to this is to take away gender options or display of any sort in our game is absurd and taking things to a logical extreme.

And If you doubt my intentions as your community manager to help provide a safe and welcoming space online, (not only is that wildly disrespectful of me and my work) I frankly don't know how to help you.

However I do not understand why they cant be changed to make them easier to recognize

GM's did excellent jobs in issuing images for research... I know they are limited by pixel sizes for emotes but as h? directors said current emotes are first step and i do feel illy GM's shud make second drop of emotes soon which makes current emotes easy to recognize, they did all the hardwork to develop these I cant imagine them not putting efforts to improve them.

emotes are more important than research images... please let your artist focus on them ...

It doesn't matter what gender anyone thinks you are in RL, that is my point. You should be treated with respect regardless, therefore showing a female or male emote is irrelevant. There is no new issue created by the emoticons that didn't exist already. And the global chat and forum rules cover these things very well already.

Also, I'm not omnipotent. If someone is harassing you (or whoever) I have to be told these things or I will not know. I can't be held responsible for acting on hypothetical things that I have never seen or have never been reported to me.

The assertion that the solution to this is to take away gender options or display of any sort in our game is absurd and taking things to a logical extreme.

And If you doubt my intentions as your community manager to help provide a safe and welcoming space online, (not only is that wildly disrespectful of me and my work) I frankly don't know how to help you.

Luna

sorry to say but as a community manager I would like ...you to listen to us carefully and raise our concerns to dev's even when they may not be nothing or maybe u cant do anything about it.

I find it bad in taste to SC clarify topic in a better way to us than you do.

I do find your assertive language LOUD enough to feel hurt.

I loved GM's coming out in open on GC to speak with us, now a days its very less and i shud say i would love to see SC and TC out open many times which may mean getting some wrong estimates but then hey they kept us interested here

It doesn't matter what gender anyone thinks you are in RL, that is my point. You should be treated with respect regardless, therefore showing a female or male emote is irrelevant. There is no new issue created by the emoticons that didn't exist already. And the global chat and forum rules cover these things very well already.

Also, I'm not omnipotent. If someone is harassing you (or whoever) I have to be told these things or I will not know. I can't be held responsible for acting on hypothetical things that I have never seen or have never been reported to me.

The assertion that the solution to this is to take away gender options or display of any sort in our game is absurd and taking things to a logical extreme.

And If you doubt my intentions as your community manager to help provide a safe and welcoming space online, (not only is that wildly disrespectful of me and my work) I frankly don't know how to help you.

Luna

My point is that it's not a perfect world and just because it shouldn't matter does not mean that it does not. It may not be creating an entirely new issue but it's also not helping one that already exists. As much as I'd love for the game to have an environment where no one judged you based on your gender that's simply not the case and adding a feature that potentially makes a problem all that much worse is just silly. Furthermore, if you really do think my gender is irrelevant why did they make the emoticons gender specific in the first place? People have already voiced concerns about their profile pictures being a bad representation of who they are, why make it worse with the emoticons?

And at no point did I say that you should take away the gender options. I said we should have the option to either change it from male, female or not given. Which I think is a completely fair option given it's one that is allowed on these very forums. In fact I find it very hypocritical of you to call me on that when you're planning to introduce an option to turn off emotes all together, something that would be very similar to turning off gender identity all together (though only if you want to).

I do apologize for bringing up the racist and sexist comments thing. This isn't the place for it and while I do think more could have been done in several particular situations, you weren't around for those either. I don't doubt you're intentions, though I do think you have a tenancy to make changes without thinking about how they'll be received or thinking about the bigger picture but that's an entirely different topic.

This is a feature in the game to help draw us more into the game. Since you picked a female human, you are therefor a female human on the game. So you should smile like a female human.

You picked a male orc, you are now a male orc on the game. You should frown like a male orc. Get used to it.

You picked a female elf and your a male in real life. Well guess what, you are now a female elf on the game. (Though I think you knew that when you first picked a female elf as your character.) So guess what, while you play you can smile like a female elf.

I remember back about 50 some days ago when this feature was not in the game. Was funny how some guys would say I'm a female when I did :P. Some even hit on me. But the funny part was, we didn't have this feature back then. Some how, they were able to figure out I was a female elf. Though joke was on them, since I'm really a male human in real life.

So men and women smile differently? I don't think so. You use an emote to get across some kind of emotion. So if you're sad you do =( to emphasize that because words are so emotionless. Gender however has absolutely nothing to do with that. That's why traditionally emoticons are gender-less. Gender is completely irrelevant to emotion.

So men and women smile differently? I don't think so. You use an emote to get across some kind of emotion. So if you're sad you do =( to emphasize that because words are so emotionless. Gender however has absolutely nothing to do with that. That's why traditionally emoticons are gender-less. Gender is completely irrelevant to emotion.

Yes we both smile the same, but on Illyriad men do not have hair. Women have hair. :P

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